Biscuits and cookies have been part of our life since long time, we all love and like to eat some or other type of biscuits or cookies due its brand, taste, health benefits and many other reasons. One thing that we all love about them is their crispness, crispy and crunchy biscuits have always been first choice as biscuit and cookie lover. If it’s not crunchy then as consumer we never felt like we have some good biscuit or cookie and some it’s not baked properly, even if it’s over crunched and browned lots then also it gives taste like its burned while baking. Hence baking of biscuits and cookies become very important and critical for them to taste at best.
Baking is one of very critical process in biscuits and cookies manufacturing plants, and it’s defined in food processing as process to heat the food to reduce its moisture completely and give them sustainable solid structure, so that they can last for longer time duration. In short the baking is kind of cooking food by the manner of direct heat. Most important part or need of baking is heat that is applied to biscuit or any other item to be baked. Hence the process of baking is completely dependent on the heating system and heat temperature that is applied in baking.
The conventional heating system has been used in baking process from longer time but having many limitations such as :
- Longer time to bake
- Larger area in for baking system
- Response time is huge
- Temperature control is difficult
- Fuel consumption is high
- Irregular baking
due to above limitations the conventional heater based baking ovens have not able to deliver the desired quality of product. But in past there was no choice but to use the conventional heating technology in baking process, but as the time has change an introduction of infrared and microwave heating systems started getting popularity in industrial heating and market needed well baked high quality product.
Higher productivity with good quality in lesser time can be achieved at lower opex cost. Conventional heaters based baking ovens had always faced issues of incomplete baking as the conventional heating/drying technique used to heat the biscuits and cookies from the outer surface to inner, this many time lead to baking outer surface fully and the inner part left unbaked. This ultimately resulted in customer complaints about the biscuits and cookies. Microwave heating systems provided best solution to this problem as it heats from inside- out, so microwave based baking ovens produces biscuits and cookies which were well cooked from inside but the out crust of the biscuits and cookies still not able to take the texture that should have. Hence the engineers had thought of the combining infrared and microwave heating system as new hybrid solution to specified need of the industry.
The Infrared Heating System works similar to that of conventional heater with advantages such as the higher speed of productivity in lesser time, requires smaller space, highly controllable and fuel efficient. This bakes the biscuits and cookies from outer crust and gives it the texture that is needed.
Hence hybrid system works best with infrared heater drying outside-in and at the end using microwave heating system to heat inside-out, hence giving perfectly baked crispy and crunchy biscuits and cookies ready to delight the biscuit and cookies lovers.